Giving highway engineering "wisdom" and establishing new generation five-in-one system of "Internet+" design, construction, management, monitoring and operation, namely, the smart highway, was the hot issue of the interdisciplinary study of civil engineering, control engineering, mechanical engineering, transportation engineering, and computer science. To comprehensively understand the smart highway, this review focused on the critical technology in the integrated system in full life-cycle of the smart highway as well as systematically investigated the relevant previous efforts, critical common technologies, and future scopes on multi-function pavement material, smart construction, smart detection, autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles, and internet of things technology.